‘A liberal mugged by reality’

23 September 2009

Douglas Murray celebrates the life of Irving Kristol, one of the most influential conservative thinkers of the postwar era, who died last week

Witnessing postwar America slipping into moral relativism, and the failure of the country’s institutions to stand against those who wished to destroy them, he certainly migrated — although he disputed whether it was him or the world around him that had moved. Becoming a neoconservative in the 1960s did not require a leap, he once pointed out: ‘All you had to do was stand in place.’ ‘A neoconservative,’ he famously explained, ‘is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’

As such, he embodied as well as defined the neoconservative tendency (as he called it: it was never a school or doctrine). Amused by the reality that had mugged his liberal certainties, he was also roused to anger. And he had a particularly useful weapon in his intellectual armoury. Having been of the left, he knew how his new opponents thought — and why.

Amazed at the reaction to communism by so-called liberals, he wrote in 1954: ‘Communism today rules one third of the human race, and may soon rule more. It is the most powerful existing institution which opposes such changes and reforms as liberalism proposes. Why, then, should not liberals, and liberals especially, fear and hate it?’ It was a question that those who listened to Kristol would go on to ask again as events unfolded.

His brand of what has been called ‘moral realism’ was at its best when applied to economics in Two Cheers for Capitalism and in his prolific writings on welfare. His skill lay not only in his ability to turn a memorable phrase but in his skill at overturning accepted dogma. Of the liberal obsession with ‘equality’ he once wrote: ‘Rich men are fine, poor men are fine, so long as they are decent human beings. I do not like equality. I do not like it in sports, in the arts, or in economics. I just don’t like it in this world.’